Newsletter

Study points to ‘resegregation’ of Florida’s public schools

Although Florida is becoming a more racially diverse state, its public-school system is becoming more segregated, a new study from the LeRoy Collins Institute shows.

“Student enrollment trends in Florida over the past decades show growing racial isolation for Hispanic and black students on some measures, with signs of continuous segregation on others,” according to the study, titled “Patterns of Resegregation in Florida’s Schools.”

Some 32 percent of Hispanic students and 35 percent of black students in Florida attend “intensely segregated” schools, defined as have a nonwhite student body of 90 percent or greater, according to the study.

In St. Johns County the picture is less pronounced than in other parts of the state. The study reports that the student makeup of district schools was 85.8 percent white or Asian in 1994. Of that group, 12.5 percent shared classrooms with black or Hispanic students.

Twenty-plus years later, the numbers have not changed very much. Whites and Asians still overwhelmingly make up the largest racial category of the student body in St. Johns County, at 82.8 in 2014, and 11 percent of them had exposure to students of color in their educational environment.

Conversely, the report found that black or Hispanic students in St. Johns County were more likely to attend school with other minorities than their white or Asian counterparts, with 23.6 percent of blacks exposed to other black or Hispanic students and 12.6 percent of Hispanic students sharing those classrooms.

The study also found the highest concentration of “intensely segregated” schools was in more urban areas, including Jacksonville, as well as lower-income neighborhoods within a given school district.

Zoning and issues of affordable housing has a lot to do with how diverse a community’s schools are, according to Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles who helped write the LeRoy Collins report.

“The non-white population is very clustered in metropolitan areas, areas where there is higher immigration rates, and areas where there is lower-income places to live, and that all contributes to continued segregation whether it is the law of the land or not,” Orfield said in a phone interview with The Record Monday.

In St. Johns, it’s easy to see the difference in composition between schools in different geographical areas of the county. At The Webster School, a K-5 school in the West Augustine section of St. Augustine, the breakdown was 62.1 percent white, 33.4 percent black, 4.8 percent Hispanic and .77 percent Asian. In less racially diverse St. Johns in the county’s northwest, Hickory Creek Elementary School is comprised of 90.9 percent white students, 1.9 percent black, 6.8 Hispanic and 3.5 Asian.

Last year, the district was granted status by the U.S. Department of Justice as meeting requirements to be considered “completely integrated.” The decision enables the school board to make decisions for St. Johns County schools without oversight from the court.

According to the lastest figures provided by the St. Johns County School District, of the school system’s 37,279 students, 85.6 percent were white, 4.2 percent Asian, 7.1 percent black and 8.7 percent Hispanic, as well as smaller percentages of multi-racial or ethnic backgrounds.

The only recommendation made by the Department of Justice was that the district could make more headway in matching the percentage of black faculty to the percentage of black students. Currently, the district’s instructional staff is 93 percent white.

In Orfield’s opinion, students of all races do better in school when they are exposed to, not separated from, students different from themselves.

“They are going to be better prepared for life, have more competition in the classroom, a richer curriculum, and get to understand students from different backgrounds and cultures,” Orfield said. “We all need these soft skills to prepare us for the world beyond school.”

This story includes reporting from the News Service of Florida.

READ THE REPORT

Go to http://bit.ly/2wu7fFE to read “Patterns of Resegregation in Florida’s Schools.”